“Got it.”
As she was making the spit wad out of toilet paper, she thought, Not to be paranoid at all, but that’s why I have to pay more attention to him.
After she’d blocked the peephole, she went to her laptop and did a Google search on peephole intrusions—and learned that women were not only watched, but had actually been filmed through the peephole as they undressed inside their locked rooms.
Yet another reason, Letty thought, that all women should be issued guns at birth.
* * *
The next day they went back to Pear Tree Lane first thing, but found no pickups parked on the street. “Damn it, I think it was about here,” Letty said, as they rolled down Pear Tree. “That’s what I’ve got in my mind’s eye, anyway. Let’s go over to the assessor’s office, see if they can help us out.”
The tax office was located in a scuffed-up brown-brick building with a scuffed-up yard; they were waited on by a scuffed-up counter clerk with a waxed black Hercule Poirot mustache and a friendly demeanor. There was nothing particularly interesting on the list of owners on Pear Tree Lane, except that a half-dozen houses were owned by the same company. The company’s mailing address was in Denver, Colorado.
“Rentals,” said the clerk. “You can buy them in there for a hundred thousand, get twelve hundred a month in rent. That’s a fourteen percent return. Try getting that from a bank.”
* * *
“Rats,” Kaiser said, when they were back outside. “Why can’t anything be simple?”
“We may have to go to the simplest thing—knock on doors,” Letty said.
“Gonna be a million degrees out there,” Kaiser said glumly.
Letty insisted, so they did it, walking along the three hundred yards of Pear Tree Lane like a couple of hopeless coupon-book salesmen, met with empty houses, people who spoke no English, and when they actually found somebody to talk to, no comprehension. “Jael? No, ain’t nobody by that name. What kind of name is that, anyway?”
* * *
But: a woman who owned a Jeep? Yes, she worked at the Fleet & Ranch store and a downtown bar at nights, or had, anyway. Friendly sort. “Why would you want her?”
There was no Jeep in sight at the house where the woman lived—one of the rentals—but there was a garage, so the Jeep might be inside. The garage had no windows, and the house appeared to be closed up, tight, maybe even grim.
“Want to knock?” Kaiser asked.
“Got your carry?”
Kaiser patted his waist, under the loose cotton shirt.
“Keep it handy. Let’s go knock,” Letty said.
They did, but got no answer. “Probably at work,” Kaiser said.
“The neighbors are probably going to tell her that we were asking, too,” Letty said. She looked back at the house, then up and down the street. “Damn it. I think this was about where I saw that truck parked. The one with the sticker. This might be her house.”
“Don’t start thinking about coming back at night,” Kaiser said. “I don’t think this would be a street where you’d want to do that.”
Kaiser drove, taking them back to the hotel, while Letty called Greet at DHS. “We need to have you call the Yandel Investment Corp. in Denver, Colorado, and see if they can give you the name of the woman who rents one of their houses in El Paso . . .” She gave Greet the house number. “If you get her name, we need you to turn that through NCIS to see what kind of record she has . . . and maybe see if you could get her tax returns, figure out exactly what she’s been doing here in El Paso.”
“Tax returns will take a court order, but, it’s usually fairly quick,” Greet said. “I talked to Senator Colles, he’s been goosing the FBI, but I haven’t heard back. Things are moving, but I can’t guarantee how fast they’ll be going.”